I really wonder after complaints about Google last week what companies have same benefits but are not known as much as much Google or Facebook. There were some comments that such companies exist and some of them even have more benefits than mainstream companies.

From my limited experience this summer with Amazon: owning code in production is great. It's a truly awesome and unique learning experience. You get to see big systems fail in so many ways and solve problems trying to find root cause.

I sort of use SAS sometimes. There are definite downsides, like the UI/IDE is an abomination from the 1980s. And anything except the most straight forward of code is impossible to read (and many other things). However, in terms of being fast and being and all-in-one language+data solution (meaning no calls to a seperate database solution) it has something to say for it.

But yeah, I sort of hate it. If it had modern syntax and data structures and UI it might not be bad.

Do not overestimate Google's benefits. There is nothing magical in what they offer. The only reason why you should consider working at Google is people and your CV (if you will manage to get job in Google).

I'm a bit late to the party, but I'll nominate the company I work for - Canonical (although the part about no media coverage has been somewhat untrue the last few days ;).

Let me tell you why.

1.) 100% work from home (minus ~2 one week trips per year)
2.) Get paid to write cool open source software.
3.) Work with smart people from all over the globe.

#1 can't be overstated. This isn't just "flex time" or "work from home when you want to". There is literally no office to go to for most people at Canonical. Working at home is the default. The difference is huge. My last company let us work from home as much as we wanted, but most of the company worked from San Fransisco... which means when there were meetings, 90% of the people were in the room, and the rest of us were on a crappy speakerphone straining to hear and having our questions ignored. At Canonical, everyone is remote, so everyone works to make meetings and interactions work well online... and these days it's easy with stuff like Google Hangouts and irc and email and online bug tracking etc.

Working on open source is like entering a whole different world. I'd only worked on closed source before, and the difference is awesome. There's purposeful openness and inclusion of the community in our development. Bug lists are public, and anyone can file one. Mailing lists are public (for the most part) and anyone can get on them. irc channels are public, and anyone can get on them. It's a really great feeling, and puts us so much closer to the community - the people that have perhaps an even bigger stake in the products we make than we do. Not only that, but we write software for people like us. Developers. You are the target market, in most cases. And that makes it easy to get excited about the work and easy to be proud of and show off what you do.

Finally, the people. I have people on my team from Germany, the UK, Malta, the UAE, Australia, and New Zealand. It's amazing working with people of such different backgrounds. And when you don't have to tie yourself down to hiring people within a 30 mile radius, you can afford to be more picky. Canonical doesn't skimp on the people, either. I was surprised that nearly everyone on my team was 30+ (possibly all of them, I don't actually know how old everyone is ;) That's a lot of experience to have on one team.

Canonical's benefits don't match Google or Facebook (you get the standard stuff, health insurance, 401k etc, just not the crazy stuff). However, I'm pretty sure the salaries are pretty comparable... and Google and Facebook don't let you work 100% from home. I'm pretty sure they barely let you work from home at all. And that is a huge quality of life issue for me. I don't have to slog through traffic and public transportation to get to work. I just roll out of bed, make some coffee, and sit down at my desk.

I lived in Vegas for a few years, and never ran out of interesting things to do. There are lots of great outdoor activities like mountain biking, hiking, golf, etc. that you can enjoy at least 10 months out of the year (depending on your tolerance for heat in the summer). You can even ski at Lee Canyon.

Although you're dismissive of the strip, and I can understand why from the typical visitors' perspective, there are literally tons of things to do there and many of them are significantly discounted or free to Las Vegas residents. I did the math and over the course of 3 years I went to tens of thousands of dollars of things for free.

There are concerts, some of the best restaurants in the world, conventions, boxing, shopping, and more. Traffic is manageable. Cost of living is low. Flights to most places are cheap. You can be in Southern California or doing outdoorsy stuff in Utah for the weekend with a few hours drive, or easy 1 hour flights.

Anybody supplying contractors to the NSA. From the central banking database you know how much money they have in what bank account. From Facebook you know if they could be dead by now. The sum of all monetary holdings of any of these targets forms collectively a bounty on their heads. Do you really need to see Edward Snowden's stash of documents to understand this? I don't.